Kevin Gausman and the bullpen split 2 hits, and the Braves finally scratched across some runs late to even the series at 2 – 2, finish the road trip at 5 – 2, and put a 22 games in 20 days ordeal behind them at 13 – 9.

Gausman finished with 80 pitches in 5 innings, walked 1, and struck out 5. Jesse Biddle, Dan Winkler, Brad Brach, and A.J. Minter closed it out with an inning apiece, cumulatively allowing only a walk to go with the other Marlins hit.

The Braves now stand at 73 – 57, and hold a 3 game lead over the Phillies.

I hate to be a doomsayer but TB is going to be really tough. They are on an 8-game winning streak that included four against the Red Sox. I am sure most of it is pitching so don’t expect too many runs. I would be happy with a split with TB, a win against the Cubs, and 2/3 against the Pirates and then on to the tough stuff. At that point, reinforcements will be available.

We seem to be experts at scheduling teams that are very hot.

Phils against the gNats again so hopefully the gNats will give is some aid and comfort.

I also hope the day off helps some.

Has anyone noticed that Ozzie is a great pinch hitter? Every time he gets a day off, he does something positive in a PH appearance.

Coming off of the four game sweep at home to the Rockies, the Braves managed to go 5-2 on the road, and actually tacked two games onto their lead in the division. I think they’d take that week every time, from here to the playoffs.

In other news, over the weekend Atlanta United’s Josef Martinez broke the four way tie for most goals scored in a season, notching the game winner against “rivals” Orlando City with a beautiful little chip. He now stands alone as the league’s single season goal scoring king, with 28.

He has 8 more games to play. Barring injury or being pulled from matches to rest for the playoffs, he’s going to obliterate the previous record (27) by light years.

I continue to find conversation of upcoming schedules in baseball as a metric for determining who’s more likely to win the division less than compelling. Maybe it’s just me, but I feel this is an aspect of the phenomenon where people watch baseball through the prism of a football fan.

For instance, people were including Pittsburgh in the “the rest of our schedule is gonna be tough” talk going into last week, but they were terrible. Now people aren’t really worried about them next weekend, but watch them somehow snap up two of three or something.

Yeah, if you look at how we played last weekend vs. how Tampa Bay played, we’d be lucky to split, but it really doesn’t work like that in baseball.

The only part of the upcoming schedule that I’ll grant a waiver on and admit it might be meaningfully difficult is the 7-game West Coast swing without an off day. However, that’s almost entirely based on the travel considerations baked into that, not the on-field difficulty of those games.

Mercedez Benz Stadium’s capacity is somewhere around 71k for a regular event. It can be expanded for special events to hold up to 75k. So no, 78k is too much for the venue to hold. That said, here is a list of Major League Soccer’s largest crowds:

A bit of reference for the non-socceroos among us. The largest crowds for league play soccer, in the world, tend to be in Germany’s Bundesliga. The Bundesliga is one of the world’s four premiere leagues (all European.)

Borussia Dortmund will regularly draw 80k fans or so to league play. Bayern Munich will draw 75k or so. Over in the English Premiere League, this year’s classic rivalry match between juggernauts Liverpool and Manchester United drew just over 74k.

It’s pretty hard to really grasp how successful Atlanta’s MLS team has been out of the gate.

It’s a long season because of all the potential irregularities. Each series is particularly meaningful in its own way, but on the much grander scale of the full season it’s just two baseball teams basically playing a little better or worse than .500 passing by each other for a brief set of games.

September is going to largely be graded by how this team handles the west coast trip and how useful the reinforcements will be. As for who they face, any team can play good ball in short doses.

If you reduce the schedule talk down to one series or another, yes, it’s going to produce outliers like “overperforming” vs. Pittsburgh and “underperforming” vs. Miami, but if you include a large sample, then I think it’s helpful. I gave a long list of quality opponents over the next 3 weeks, and I think that’s large enough to conclude that I can’t be disappointed if we go even .500 against that group. Splitting a series with Miami? Disappointing.

With Touki and Bryse coming in September, if the bad Julio shows up we should be able to yank him quickly. Hopefully that won’t be the case, but it doesn’t take many pitches to recognize the bad Julio.

There was a time where Beachy, Medlen, Venters, and O’Flaherty were excelling above their pedigree and, seemingly, their talent and most thought McDowell was doing a perfectly fine job. It shows how hard coordinators and coaching are to evaluate.

@17 right. Bundesliga is drawing the most spectators overall every season since they built lots of new, modern stadiums for the world cup when Germany last hosted it. I just finished watching my team, Hamburg (SV) tonight – and they relegated into the second division for this season. Still 47K spectators came to watch a second division game against a shitty, most boring competitor tonight.

If you let Teheran eat innings the first few months and stick with the plan to provide an extra day of rest whenever possible, you're less likely to end up in a position where you may need to limit the younger arms down the stretch